Cellphone app could help police

Sunday

Jul 21, 2013 at 6:00 AM

By Peter S. Cohan, WALL & MAIN

Should Worcester police try Mark43?

Mark43 is a new mobile phone application that ties together, in one place, the functions of at least five antiquated police applications, including a mobile app that police can use to get street-level information and a desktop tool that can analyze reams of data.

Mark43 cuts the time it takes to do these police tasks "from five to six hours to 30 to 45 minutes," according to Scott Crouch, the chief executive officer of the company that produced the app, in a July 10 interview.

Founded by three members of Harvard College's class of 2013 — Mr. Crouch, Flo Mayr and Matt Polega — Mark43 was the result of a Harvard engineering class project that was based at Harvard's Innovation Lab during the students' senior year.

The students tagged along with police officers in Springfield and the state police Special Projects Team, and watched how the officers and troopers worked on the street, in their squad cars and back at their desks.

A Mark43 investor, Alex Finkelstein, general partner of Spark Capital, could not cite how Mark43 improved Springfield's crime statistics. However, in a July 12 interview, he made me think of the 2002 movie "Minority Report," in which a pre-crime unit arrested criminals before they committed their misdeeds.

Mr. Finkelstein said Mark43 gave Springfield's police pre-crime unit-like powers. He pointed out that in a March 2013 Boston Globe article, Springfield state police Trooper Stephen Gregorczyk credited Mark43 with giving his colleagues "the ability to stop a shooting before it happens."

The Globe recounted how Trooper Gregorczyk used Mark43 to learn about the locations, law enforcement interactions and personal connections of a furious local drug dealer bent on revenge after he had been robbed. A quick search of the dealer's name in Mark43 gave the trooper "a road map to plot how his team could head off the dealer before something bad happened."

The Springfield Police Department also cut its information processing time. By getting a "90 percent increase in information efficiency," it can spend the saved time collecting more intelligence and performing more social network analysis.

Mr. Crouch and his co-founders saw first-hand the appalling information systems they used. As Mr. Crouch argued, "They have multiple systems built for desktops with 15- to 20-year-old architectures, and they don't work with each other. And what's worse, the vendors don't get police input for their systems designs, and they grossly overcharge the police departments."

Mr. Crouch's team also fit the Mark43 design with the way police actually work.

"We saw that police officers always keep their dominant hand on their weapon. So we had to make a mobile app that a right-handed officer could use with his left hand," said Mr. Crouch.

Mark43 wants to solve a societal problem — and tap a big market opportunity — by delivering a better product at a lower price.

"Our EMTs, firefighters and police are kind, generous people doing important work without the proper tools," he said. "There are 800,000 local and state police, 100,000 federal officers, and millions worldwide. Our competitors are charging between $250,000 to $500,000 upfront for an inferior product, while we offer a very affordable per officer, per month pricing model."

Mr. Finkelstein — who grew up on Martha's Vineyard, was a venture capitalist at Softbank, sold five TV shows to Hollywood and is a Spark co-founder — took about three weeks to decide to invest in Mark43.

Why so fast? According to Mr. Finkelstein, "The founders are young, aggressive and fearless. They care deeply about law enforcement. A friend who is a narcotics officer in the Boston Police Department gave Mark43 fantastic feedback."

Mr. Finkelstein noted, "My friend said that Mark43 slashes officers' 10 hours a week of paperwork, replaces antiquated systems that don't talk to each other, and lets officers capture and access data via mobile — instead of forcing them to use the laptops bolted down to their dashboards."

Mr. Finkelstein sounds confident in Mark43's future. As he explained, "It's a great team and a great product. They really want to change law enforcement. They truly, truly care."

And Mark43 is hiring to meet growing demand. According to Mr. Crouch, "We have software deployed in Massachusetts, California, and more departments across the country are coming onboard in the next few months. There is a ton of inbound interest right now. We have not reached out to a single department yet."